“Time, gentlemen!”
Perhaps a few will roll out through the batwing doors into the Transit Lounge, where their wives and children lie asleep. There is a place here for women and children too, a home of sorts.
I wipe the counter down for old times’ sake, switch off the fluorescent tubes and, in the glow from the Castle Lager sign above the dartboard, make my way to my bunk in the storeroom. I check the refrigerator door: I was happier before Mrs Boshoff and Little Bossies were put in there, among the perishables. I lie down on my bunk.
Another night in the Terminal Bar, Wilson assumed responsibility for the refrigeration of the corpses because, he said, he was a friend of the family.
Another night Wilson said, “Take your average Kreepy Krauly.”
And Boshoff said, “You should see what I did to a guy once with a Kreepy Krauly.”
Another night a woman moved slowly around the room, looking at my patrons one by one. I followed her to the men’s room. She listened at the window and I listened too. I could have thrown her out, I’m the proprietor, we have rules, but something held me back.
* * *
—
In the end, it is enough to know that the Terminal Bar is my place.
I did all the alterations myself, put in the wood-grain wallpaper, the antique mirror behind the counter, the stained-glass panels – plastic actually, you wouldn’t think so – depicting naked peasant girls trampling out the vintage, the linoleum (because it’s easy to clean) and the clock, embedded in the sawn-off end of a wine barrel. Plastic also. Too bad it doesn’t work. Stuck on 11 o’clock. But that serves us well: it is always kick-out time in the Terminal Bar, even if no one leaves.
I’m a stickler for detail. You will see that the dishcloths are dollar bills, in cotton – a gift from an American who was passing through. Over the bar there’s a springbok head and that thing next to it is a Kreepy Krauly. The coasters show scenic attractions from the four corners of the earth and portraits of famous sportsmen.
I wanted to keep a bit of the old place too. The wall behind the dartboard – that’s the original colour. Pale green is a good colour for the Terminal Bar. The light in here is watery, aquarium light, very atmospheric, it leaks from cylindrical plastic shades, it drips on the walls. Aquarium light is good too, because drunk people are like fish.
That’s a quote from Smith, the film director (he calls them motion pictures). Just let a voice be raised during a game of Killers and Smith comes blundering in here, throwing his fat stomach around, and Moloi after him, pointing the camera, sticking his nose in. “The fish are at it,” Smith says, “let’s catch them.” Then Boshoff throws Smith and Moloi out because they’re disturbing the clientele. The two of them aren’t allowed in here any more.
Pale green is a good colour for the Terminal Bar if you ask me, but a lot of people disagree. It takes all kinds, they say, and it’s hard to keep them happy. Boshoff, for example, likes pale green: it reminds him of an officers’ mess somewhere and makes him feel at home. Then again Wilson, the Kreepy Krauly salesman, can’t stand the colour. He said so plainly on the day he pitched up.
We don’t have too many new arrivals. Wilson came out of nowhere. Josephine heard him knocking at the window in the men’s room while she was cleaning the urinals and she called me. I took a good look at him first – you can’t be too careful. Fat and freckled, grubby white suit, tie with the knot undone. Looked harmless enough. I gestured to him to go round to the front, to the entrance through the Transit Lounge.
He comes in carrying a five-litre bottle of pool chemical, a Cadac Mini-Braai and a canvas duffel bag. He’s pouring sweat. I give him a drink and he collapses into a chair, swigs, stares at the pale-green wall. “This place looks like a swimming pool badly in need of a Kreepy Krauly,” he says. Can you believe it?
Boshoff rises to the bait. “Listen, you.”
“Wilson,” the newcomer puts in, “salesman.”
“You’re not at home,” Boshoff continues. “You don’t have opinions.”
But even while Boshoff is speaking Wilson heaves himself to his feet, opens the duffel bag and unpacks a Kreepy Krauly. A magnificent specimen, thirty foot long if it’s an inch, with a livid head and a pale sucker trailing filaments of slime. The men gather round.
“Who the hell do you think you are barging in here and passing comments about the decor,” Boshoff says.
Wilson plugs the tail-end of the Kreepy Krauly into the cash register and the long, ribbed body shudders. He calls for water, and Weinberg, who was still with us then, sends Josephine to fill a tub. Officially, Josephine is still in Weinberg’s employ, so I don’t mind.
“You’re a big baby.”
Josephine brings the tub. Wilson takes off his jacket, rolls up one shirtsleeve and tests the temperature of the water with his elbow. Apparently he’s satisfied, because he submerges the Kreepy Krauly’s head.
I can see trouble coming. Boshoff is getting angry. No one’s listening to him, they’re all crowded around the tub, where the Kreepy Krauly is gasping and gurgling as it comes back to life. I turn my back on them and polish some glasses: that way I can watch them in the mirror.
Here it comes. Boshoff pulls out his revolver and fires a shot into the ceiling. Fists fly, the tub overturns, Smith rushes in with Moloi hot on his heels. A woman’s face appears at the batwing doors. The Kreepy Krauly, liberated unexpectedly from the tub, creeps away between the tables.
Jesus, these people.
* * *
—
Then Father O’Reilly takes me aside, points out Wilson’s Cadac and suggests we have a braai. That should restore the peace and boost the morale. The idea doesn’t grab me – stinking up the Bar with the smell of burning meat, splashing grease all over everything – but the situation’s getting out of hand.
I switch on the fluorescent tubes – they generally have a sobering effect – and Father O’Reilly climbs up on a chair and calls for order. While he’s explaining the plan, I take Josephine into the storeroom and instruct her to rustle up some meat. By the time I come back into the Bar the men are piling the tables and chairs – making space for dancing, they say – and setting up the Mini-Braai. The Kreepy Krauly has climbed the wall behind the dartboard, leaving a trail of slime and blistered paint, but I bite my tongue. The men are in a festive mood. They draw chairs into a circle around the gas bottle and start to discuss fire-building techniques. Wilson lights the gas but has to turn it off again: the meat hasn’t arrived yet and resources are scarce.
Weinberg and I take a luggage trolley to the fridge to load up the cabbages. He won’t do it on his own because of Mrs Boshoff and Little Bossies. Afterwards, from my post at the batwing doors, I watch him push the trolley over to the counter at Budget Rent-a-Car where the women are standing by to prepare the salads. There’s a party atmosphere in the Transit Lounge too. The children are playing hide-and-seek among the shanties. The curtains, which we usually keep drawn across the tinted plate-glass windows, have been opened. Each window frames an identical segment of cold grey runway and empty veld. It is always winter, it is always twilight, beyond the glass. That’s why we keep the curtains closed.
Josephine appears at last with a bundle of meat on her head and Wilson lights the gas again.
Boshoff has speared the first chop (horse-meat actually, but you wouldn’t say so) on the end of a fork and is about to throw it into the fat when the peace is shattered by a burst of gunfire and a crash of breaking glass. We take cover behind the counter. Boshoff draws his revolver. Silence, broken only by the slurping of the Kreepy Krauly as it edges along the murky waterline where the pale-green wall meets the ceiling. Then a loudhailer: “You are surrounded! Give yourselves up!”
“Over my dead body,” Boshoff mutters.
We lie still. More gunfire, more breaking glass, children crying.
“Someone should d
o a recce,” Boshoff says.
Wilson volunteers. He crawls over to the batwing doors, peers under them, motions us to join him.
The Transit Lounge is full of soldiers in combat gear, their faces smeared with boot polish, their cuffs and collars stuffed with grass and twigs. They all carry rifles – “of foreign origin,” according to Boshoff – and one has a mine detector and is sweeping the floor around the delicious monsters. Another has a pistol and shouts a lot: obviously the leader.
“He’s in charge all right,” Boshoff says. “And only a captain. Just shows you. I could wipe him out with one shot.”
“What about the women and children?” Wilson asks.
The women and children huddle together at the Information desk. A soldier guards them while the others search the tents and lean-tos. Two of our windows have been broken in the attack and these rectangles of hot, white runway and bleached sky stand out like overexposed frames in a strip of film.
Smith and Moloi appear from behind a pot plant and creep on their hands and knees towards the captain. Moloi has his camera pointed at the captain’s boots.
Weinberg shivers. “Those jokers are going to get us into a lot of trouble.”
“Damn right,” Boshoff says. “Any second now the terrorists are going to start performing for the camera.”
“Maybe someone should tell them the camera doesn’t have film in it,” Weinberg suggests. “They ran out six months ago.”
“I’ll do it,” Father O’Reilly says. “They wouldn’t harm a man of the cloth.”
Father O’Reilly goes over to the captain and they speak briefly. The captain shoots Father O’Reilly in the foot. He gives orders. The soldiers start poking around in the salads with their bayonets and blowing up hand luggage.
I feel like crying. You grow to love a place, even a place like the Transit Lounge. Boshoff’s a bok for mounting a counter-attack. He keeps waving the revolver and taking aim, but Wilson stops him with: “What about the women and children?”
After a while the captain comes towards the Bar and we hide behind the tables. As he pushes through the batwing doors the Kreepy Krauly reaches the corner of the room and lets out a contented sigh. The captain raises his pistol and fires.
The bullet hits the Kreepy Krauly in the head, spattering cogs and sprockets. A spasm runs through its body and bursts into the cash register, causing the drawer to spring open. The sucker cannot find purchase, the neck bends, the head slides slowly down to the floor and rolls over, gasping and rattling.
The captain, who’s been watching the Kreepy Krauly’s last moments curiously, bangs on the counter with his water bottle. The men look at me. Forget it! Wilson sits up. “I’ll handle this,” he says, and goes over to the counter with the bottle of pool chemical. He spends a long time mixing something and decanting it into the water bottle. I look out under the batwing doors. Father O’Reilly is hopping around on one foot, and Smith and Moloi are walking backwards and sideways, pointing the camera.
The soldiers withdraw, taking with them the cabbages and one of the women (fortunately no one’s wife).
We leave Wilson weeping over the Kreepy Krauly and go into the Transit Lounge to assess the damage. Not too bad. Apart from the broken windows and a few craters everything is normal. Josephine starts tidying up and we get the women to tend to Father O’Reilly while we go back to the braai. But the flame has been burning all this time and the gas bottle is empty. Boshoff flies off the handle. He says Wilson was supposed to be looking after the fire, he’ll break his fat neck.
An ugly scene was developing, but monkey nuts and drinks on the house restored order.
* * *
—
Another night in the Terminal Bar – no, later that same night – the discussion turned to civil defence. Boshoff recalled the speech he once made to a women’s club on the proper procedure for dealing with terrorists, and the men asked him to repeat his presentation. “You never know when it might come in handy,” someone said.
Boshoff needs props. First he calls for a stick of grissini. He knows there’s a whole box of the stuff in the storeroom, a gift from an Italian who got out of here by hiding in some laundry. Then he needs a pair of pliers. I can’t help him with that, but he settles for a nutcracker. Finally, he wants Wilson, he says he’ll be perfect as the captured terrorist. To a T, is how he puts it.
All this time Wilson’s been tinkering with the Kreepy Krauly, trying to coax it back to life, and he doesn’t even look up when his name is called. Boshoff gets angry again. “Ek is Bossies!” he shouts and rips open his shirt. His name is tattooed across his chest in letters six inches high and coiled around with serpents, the “i” dotted by a hairy nipple.
Suddenly Wilson’s happy to oblige. He lets himself be bound with his own tie to a chair standing in the space cleared earlier for dancing. Boshoff now calls this space the Interrogation Room, explaining that the similarity between the word “interrogation” and the word “terrorist” is no coincidence.
“This is how it works,” Boshoff says. “I come into the room and put my pliers here where the prisoner can get a good look at them.” He leaves the nutcracker on the floor and goes off to play Killers with Weinberg. Smith tells Moloi to get a close-up of the pliers and then a shot of Wilson’s face.
Soon everyone gets restless.
“See how it works,” Boshoff says, and pauses to throw his darts. “You’re all dying to know what happens next and imagining terrible things. Now let’s say that after an hour I come back and pick up my pliers. Are you ready to talk?”
Wilson is.
“Let’s also say that you’re a tough nut,” Boshoff says, flexing the nutcracker and clamping a stick of grissini in its jaws.
It is quiet in the Terminal Bar. The silence is thicker than blood.
Then Father O’Reilly hobbles in and orders a Bloody Mary, and Boshoff goes back to the dartboard, while the men squabble over the rest of the grissini and try out the nutcracker. It’s left to me to untie Wilson and give him one on the house. Smith and Moloi sit down at a table with Father O’Reilly for the exclusive interview. They’re convinced that Father O’Reilly is the man of the moment because of his wound.
* * *
—
It was another night – possibly even the very next one – Boshoff took his wife (whom we knew as Mrs Boshoff) and his daughter (Little Bossies) into the duty-free shop and blew their brains out.
I saw it coming. I said to Father O’Reilly: “Talk to Boshoff. The man’s unhappy here, he keeps ripping his shirt. That’s twice in one week. He’s used to the wide open spaces.”
Another night then, Boshoff takes his wife and daughter into the duty-free, between the perfume and the chocolates, and blows their brains out. Then he turns the weapon on himself, but can’t pull the trigger. “He discovered,” says Father O’Reilly, “that he had too much to live for.”
There’s a crush at the shop as everyone presses in around the corpses. The air is thick with whisky fumes and aftershave, the floor is sticky with blood and soft centres. Here they come now, tramping the mess back to the Bar, with Wilson in front shouting out the order.
“Dirty pigs! You aren’t coming in here with those shoes.”
That stops them in their tracks. Some of them go off to sulk in the leatherette chairs or sit on their luggage like schoolchildren waiting for a bus. A few smart alecs leave their shoes outside the door and creep over to the counter in their stinking socks.
I dish out the gin and they pick over the corpses. Wilson wants to keep them in the refrigerator as facts, just in case there’s ever a trial. He says he badly wants to be Boshoff’s friend. Weinberg says we should send the bodies on as unaccompanied luggage.
It is still 11 o’clock when Boshoff comes out of the men’s room, where he’s been pleading with Father O’Reilly for absolution, and goes sheepishly to the dartboa
rd, followed by Smith and Moloi. No one else looks at him: they all look at their reflections in the mirror. Boshoff throws a few darts, and Moloi follows the flight of each one wistfully with his camera.
Then Wilson goes over, puts an arm around Boshoff’s shoulders and lets him sob a little on his lapel.
“I know how you feel,” Wilson says. “It’s like when you lose a sale.”
* * *
—
Later that night, while the men were playing darts and Wilson was explaining how the bottom had fallen out of the Kreepy Krauly market, the women came for Boshoff.
It was very quiet in the Transit Lounge, too quiet, and that’s why I was at the batwing doors and saw them mustering. I spotted the ringleader at once, with my experience of these things. So here they come with this woman in front, they’re pushing in through the doors, without so much as a by-your-leave or may-I, they’re marching between the tables, they’re heading for the dartboard where a game of Killers is in progress.
“We want no trouble here,” the woman says, although they’re carrying sticks and stones and pieces of concrete from the bomb craters, “we just want Boshoff.”
They were going to string him up, I suppose, or give him a talking-to.
In any event, Boshoff’s middle name is trouble (he always says so). He steps forward. “Ek is Bossies,” he says, and rips open the front of his shirt.
Flashback Hotel Page 10
